Archives: Blogging

I want to restart, reinvigorate, reignite and generally revamp this blog.

I want to make it look nicer and easier to read on your phone.

I want to create a plan for what I talk about and how I communicate my thoughts and ideas.

I have even been considering porting all of this over onto a different site.

I want to do all of this, and that’s my biggest mistake. I’m waiting for things to be perfect, for everything to fall into place before I commit to anything. That, dear readers is never going to happen.

Just get going

“You learn how to pursue great things when your footing is unsure, when the shores are unsteady and the road is far away, when the very next step you plant may indeed be more difficult than the last.” AJ Leon, The Pursuit of Everything

I’ve got to know AJ a little over recent months, through interactions on Twitter, through signing up for his conference next year and through reading his work. I highly recommend the latter to everyone.

Reading AJ’s post in my inbox today made me realise that, like walking on a beach, my footing was unsure. Rather than using that as an excuse not to move forward with anything, I need to use it as the reason to do it.

I’ve tried and failed at so many things over the last 6 years since my transplant and I’m often disappointed in how easily I give up. I don’t stop to praise myself for starting.

Without a beginning, no story can exist. If I want to live the life I want, to help people achieve more, to communicate ideas that resonate with people, simply to write, then I have to keep starting, keep chasing and keep going.

As soon as I stop, I over-think. When I over-think I paralyse myself. Paralysis is an artist’s worst enemy.

So this is me, pushing “Go”. This is me getting started (again). This is me saying things don’t have to be perfect and spot-on and just right before I get things out there. They just have to be.

What are you sitting on and waiting to be perfect?

Last week I had a Nissen fundoplication. Exciting, huh?

It’s an operation that wraps the top bit of your stomach around the base of the oesophagus in order to prevent stomach acid (and anything else) from travelling the wrong way up and, potentially, creeping into the lungs where it can do a fair amount of damage.

That is to say it’s a fairly major operation to correct a potentially very serious problem.

I’m now the owner of five (count ’em) new holes in my stomach, taking my torso scar-count to 13 – awesome!

I also currently have scars healing both on the outside and also on the inside. Scars healing internally is the weirdest feeling every, because it hurts and is uncomfortable, but you can’t actually see any of what it is that’s hurting you. It is, quite, genuinely, one of the weirdest sensations that I’ve ever felt. I also have no idea how well (or badly) it’s healing and when the pain may subside.

So I’m now recovering at home and trying my best not to go out of my mind with boredom or let my brain get too over-excited with creativity while I’m largely unable to act on it.

Hopefully the process won’t take too long.

It’s been a while. Far too long, in fact. I almost quit this blog completely in favour of the other blog that I started a few weeks ago. But I realised that this blog means too much to walk away from.

My issue was that I didn’t know what this place was for any more; I didn’t know how to write about trying to be happy when I was, well, happy.

The whole purpose of this blog has been to focus the mind on the important things in life and to lean into discomfort in the knowledge that there’s always something to smile about. When I found myself without a battle to lean into, it suddenly seemed like an irrelevance.

Now I realise that it’s not that at all: this blog is a place where I can continue to make a difference by simply telling my story and relating it to the world.

Later this week I’ll return with a post about insignificance and why it matters – the main reason for coming back and the main reason for my new-found belief that my writing here matters.

I lead a blessed life, filled with love and abundance and when I compare it to the life I lived for so long before my transplant – in my late-teens and early-20’s – it’s a far distant as to seem like another lifetime entirely.

But it’s not – and that’s the key.

My life has changed immeasurably for the better over the past 6 years. Where I used to try to use this blog to inspire through battling the odds, it’s now a place I can hope to inspire by overcoming them.

Either way, I’m going to do it all with a smile on my face. Join me?

I’ve been down in London a lot over the last couple of months, at least one day a week to fulfill World Vision and my commitments to the Enough Food IF campaign (learn more).

Since travelling on packed-out, wedged-in tubes at peak time isn’t a terribly sensible idea for the heavily immuno-suppressed and since I’m not yet rich enough to have a private driver whisk me round the streets of our capital, I’ve taken to walking a lot more.

And, let me tell you, it’s been pretty enlightening.

Non-ambulatory

I’m embarrassed to confess I’ve never walked a lot. I grew up in Milton Keynes, the first English city to be laid out on a grid system and designed for the car rather than the pedestrian, so I was always used to driving or being driven everywhere.

Then, obviously, I was quite ill for a time which meant I didn’t do much of anything, including what little walking one can do around MK in the main shopping centre and the theatre district where all the nightlife is.

When I worked in London for 9-months last year, it was for a production company that focused on disability, run by disabled people, so I often acted as chauffeur to the producers and directors on each shoot, or simply driving the team to meetings.

But driving around London did teach me one thing (unless you count how annoying/frustrating/irritating and aggravating driving and drivers in London are): it’s not actually that big.

Certainly, it’s a metropolis of different lifestyles, cultures and rhythms, but it’s possible to get across large parts of it relatively quickly.

All of which inspired me to start looking at walking routes whenever I Google Mapped the addresses I was headed to.

And I started to walk.

Why I now choose walking

Once I started walking, it became kind of addictive. You see things from a different perspective. You have the choice to stop, to linger, to consider things you see, rather than keeping your eyes on the road or being whisked ever-onwards by public transport.

I started to notice not just the diversity, but the personality of the areas I was walking through – the little coffee shops and tea-houses, some of which were packed with locals who clearly know best.

I started to see the people of London as more than just an amorphous blob of “Londoners”.

And I started to give myself time to think.

It’s not often in the busy lives we lead that we can take time out for ourselves. Especially working in social media, I always feel a pressure to be checking what’s happening, seeing if there’s anything that needs replying to or finding new content to be sharing.

Walking around London, I started to enjoy the time I had just to walk, to think and to be myself, within myself, without chance to distract myself with something work-related.

I think we all have a habit of rushing: we rush to get to places, we rush to complete things, we rush to respond to emails, text-messages, Tweets or Facebook posts. Rarely do I take the time to sit, think and wonder.

Which is why I’m going to start walking more. Whether in London or at home in the evenings after work, I’m going to choose to step away and spend time in my own head, in my own company, digesting and processing my day.

I think we can all do with a little more “me time” and lacing up some comfortable shoes and taking ourselves out into the fresh air for a stroll is the perfect way to do it.

I’ve been away. Not away in an exciting, travelling-the-world kind of sense, just away.

It’s always hard to get back to blogging when you’re out of the habit. It’s not for shortage of ideas – in fact, part of the reason I want to get back into this SmileThroughIt lark is because I’m brimming with stories, thoughts and ideas I want to share – but it’s hard because you never quite know what to say when you’re returning.

The truth is two-fold:

Firstly, I’ve not blogged because working full-time is pretty exhausting. I hugely underestimated my own capacity for continuing with other projects (like a blog) while working full-time. I love what I do, but maintaining outside interests demands a commitment and organisational level that I haven’t managed to find yet. That and having ‘flu for a week (and needing at least another week to recover from the effects of the antibiotics and Tamiflu my docs put me on) doesn’t help.

Secondly, I became very self-conscious about what I write here.

Back in the early days of SmileThroughIt, it was easy to find things to write about, easy to pour out 500 words on my life at the time and easy to hold people’s attention with the will-he, won’t-he saga of near-death experiences.

Since my transplant, that’s all changed. I’m well, I’m living a ‘normal’ life and I sometimes wonder if anyone’s interested in what I have to write about.

But the release of Smile Through It: A Year on the Transplant List [US version here] has shown me that, actually, people are still interested. The attention and reviews it has received have been hugely flattering, but also confidence-boosting, just knowing that people do want to read my words and, more than that, they have enjoyed and got something from them.

The other reason I’ve had a break (I know, I said two, but hey, it’s my blog) is that, actually, breaks from any creative endeavour can be a good thing.

When we create something over and over and we find a pattern to our work, it can be very easy to find ourselves fitting that pattern just because it’s what we’ve always done. Sometimes it’s a productive, creative habit that helps us achieve what we want to achieve, but often it can be a counter-productive creative rut that allows us to keep rolling along without every really challenging ourselves.

I want to challenge myself creatively; I want to do many things, some of which I’m sure I will, some I probably won’t, but whatever I do or don’t do I want to know that I’m really pushing myself and testing my boundaries. If what I’m doing doesn’t scare me, I kind of feel like I shouldn’t be doing it.

Living the life you want isn’t always about the brave, bold, big choices you make. Sometimes it’s as small as changing a single habit in your life or eliminating something that weighs on you. This blog weighed on me for quite a while because I let my ego take over and worry about what people thought.

In truth, if I want to create the kind of thing I want to read (which, ultimately, is what this blog was all about in the first place), I need to care less about what other’s think and start writing for me again. If you like that, stick around (you can even subscribe and get it straight to your inbox). If not, then be well, be happy and keep smiling.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there has been a major glut in ‘Why New Year’s Resolutions Suck’ posts since the turn of the year.

The strange thing is that even thought people spend a lot of time griping about how awful they are, they still seem to make them. And the biggest issue with any kind of resolution is the kick in the teeth you get when you fail.

This isn’t one of those posts, I promise.

But I did set myself some monthly goals to achieve this year, starting with January’s 3: eating right, daily exercise and daily writing. And success for these is largely subjective: whatever I deem good enough is good enough.

This week, though, I had my attempts to follow-through on my resolutions kicked squarely up the butt by a friend – and completely inadvertently on his part, too.

A bad start

Daily exercise is something I’ve always struggled with. As I’ve written about before, I throw myself into things that are beyond my capability and end up injured, demoralised or ill. Or all three. Which sucks.

The idea of my daily exercise goal wasn’t to hop on a get-fit-quick bandwagon and end up in my usual situation of running for two days then realising I can’t run then abandoning all hope of ever being able to run and then wallowing in a pit of junk-food-laden self-pity on the couch. It was designed to follow the little-and-often maxim and, hopefully, to develop positive habits for the rest of the year.

But I didn’t.

Getting in from work in the evening I’d be tired, it would be cold outside, I’d not really want to go anywhere other than the sofa and my bed.

And I wasn’t sleeping well, despite being tired.

Then, on Monday night, I read an update on Facebook that said:

I have exercised every day since New Year. Today I have clocked up 90 mins of brisk walking. Not much to some but for me that’s impressive seeing as this time last year I could barely stand up without excruciating pain. #grateful

Gratitude

That one word hashtag at the end (let’s leave aside how irritating and pointless hashtags on Facebook are for a moment, because I like this dude and, well, it seemed to work!) made all the difference to me.

I know GB (the dude in question) had a rough ride over the last few years, to which he alludes in the post. And I realised that my lack of inspiration and motivation to get out there and do anything at all to try to develop positive habits and achieve my goals wasn’t just lazy; it was ungrateful.

All of a sudden, from apparently nowhere, I was hit by a stark realisation: of all the things I’ve used to try to drive me, of all the motivational videos I’ve YouTube’d, all the incentives I’ve tried to give myself, none will ever be as strong as the feeling that I’m not being grateful enough for my life.

My donor has afforded me opportunities I genuinely never thought I’d have and although I say I’m grateful and thankful every day, my actions seem to belie those words.

It’s time for me to live what I believe, to match my deeds to my thoughts, to accept the hard things and to remember there’s always someone worse off than more. It’s time to smile through it…

Find your own gratitude

The point is we all have our own spur. We all have something that will connect with us, drive us, keep us going when it gets really tough.

It’s not always apparent what this is and, while we may think we’ve nailed it, a large part of the reason we fail at things like New Year’s resolutions is that we haven’t truly found our motivational force.

For me, it took the example and evidence of gratitude – and my own fears and desires not to be seen as ungrateful – to find the thing that gets me off the sofa and out into the cold, dark evening to walk the village as I have done since Monday.

For you, it may be the motivation of a big challenge, to raise money for charity or dedication to supporting someone else. Whatever it may be, don’t try to find it in anyone else: it will be yours and yours alone.

Have you found yours yet? Let us know what it is in the comments below or on Twitter.

I’ve never much been one for changing everything up because another year is ticking over on the calendar but there is an undeniable pull around the adding of a digit to the year that makes it a good place to take pause.

I don’t do Near Year’s Resolutions, they more often end in disappointed and recriminations (on myself) than anything else, so this is simply an analysis of things I want to achieve this year.

In no particular order:

1. Achieve a physical challenge

The 3 Peaks has eluded me through rejection and brain-popping twice before, so I’m hoping it will be third time lucky on my birthday in May this year. I’ve spent too long sitting back and planing/wishing for things I want to achieve, 2013 is the year to go out and make it happen.

2. Write another book

Releasing Smile Through It has really brought into focus how much I love writing and having a hard-copy in my hands has made me realise that publishing things is something I want to do a lot more of. I know that I’m quite likely to out-think my capabilities (ie, want to publish a lot more than I’m capable of), so having another book out in time for Christmas next year seems like a good goal to aim for.

3. Travel more

Last year we had trips to Hawaii (for the honeymoon) and Italy (for the bro’s wedding) as well as a few jaunts around the UK, but this year I want to start exploring a little more and getting to know these fair isles even if we don’t make it over to the continent.

4. Be more confident in business

Last year’s failure of my freelancing dented my confidence quite severely. Having to take a ‘proper job’ was so anathema to me I struggled to come to terms with it before I landed well and truly on my feet at World Vision in September. Taking that role has made me realise that not only do I genuinely know what I’m talking about when it comes to social media, but I’m also damn good at it. In the past I’ve been reluctant to promote myself, but this year I want to stop shying away from the fact that I’m good at what I do and start offering my services more widely than before. I started with a new landing page about me and what I do.

5. Be more confident in myself

As somewhat of an extrovert, I manage to convince a lot of people that I’m a hugely self-confident person when in fact I’m pretty far from it. I’m uncomfortable meeting new people, feel awkward in big social situations and wish I were more attractive, fitter and healthier. This year I want to make a real effort to not just project confidence, but to be confident.

Monthly Goals

In order to help keep things on target for the 12 months ahead, I’m going to be setting myself small monthly goals along the way, something for me to keep track of and to publish to keep myself accountable. January is going to be a really busy month as I’m heavily involved in a major new campaign that World Vision will be playing a significant part in, which launches towards the end of the month, so I want to be kind to myself and not put too much pressure on.

January:

1. Exercise daily – even if it’s just a short walk around the block, I will make sure I do something each day.
2. Eat healthily – I’m going to start following Tim Ferris’s Slow-Carb Diet and be far stricter with myself.
3. Write daily – whether it be blog posts, scripts for films I’m working on or parts of my new book, I want to achieve an hour of writing every day.

I don’t know if I’m setting the bar too high for myself here, but if I don’t try I won’t know (as with all things in life). I also don’t know if these goals are too generalised and not specific enough to keep me motivated when the cold, dark days fight to get the better of me, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Joining In

I’d love for you to share your goals and plans for 2013 here, too. What one thing would you most like to achieve by the end of January – it could be super-specific or totally general, but join in and we can all help each other stay accountable. You can also keep tabs on me (and keep me in line) by following me on Twitter or joining me on Google+.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2013 for each and every one of us.

I’m astonished logging in to the blog today to discover it’s been a month since I last wrote here. Why so? And why write now, at midnight on a Friday?

Because I’ve just read this and because I’ve had one of the most wonderful weeks of my life where I finally found peace with who I am, what I want to achieve and the knowledge and faith that if I want to, I will.

I wrote to my mailing list a couple of weeks ago about how disappointed I’ve been in myself recently. I’ve tried new things and failed. I’ve retried old things and failed again. I should have been celebrating the release of my first book and instead I was focusing on the negative things in my life and how ‘hard’ things were.

And yes, you’re right to scoff; how hard can life really be when I’ve just published a book that describes my journey that culminated in my being about as close to death as it’s possible to be while still breathing and moving around.

The truth is, I’d lost my way.

I’d lost the focus on the things in life that make me smile.

I’d lost my belief in myself and my dreams, that I can make things happen if only I put my mind to them.

I’d lost my understanding of the world around me and my place in it.

I was fearful; scared of a future I couldn’t predict, never realising that no one can.

I felt insignificant, I felt lost, I felt directionless and unable to see through the fog.

And then this week I spent a day with a group of people I greatly admire, hugely respect and feel an enormous amount of love for. And sharing the day with them, opening ourselves up to the world around us and to the spiritual world we wanted to share helped not only connect with my beliefs, but also with the inner sense of self I’d lost.

I’ve been crying out for an answer to my questions, all the while ignoring the signs for what I know to be true.

So far from being a downbeat and reflective post bemoaning the downfall and deletion of this blog – after all, what did I have to say the world any more – it’s an opportunity for me to wish you all an amazing end to 2012 (now the world hasn’t ended).

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, that you celebrate the festivities in whatever way befits your beliefs (even if that’s not at all), and I hope you welcome 2013 with open arms and fresh excitement for what the world has to offer each and every one of us.

I don’t expect next year to be all green grass and rose-tinted, but I do hope that it delivers on the promise of the end of 2012.

The blog will be back in the new year; changed, perhaps, but still the same me, with the same beliefs and the same will to show you all that it doesn’t matter where you come from or where you’re going, only what you choose to do with where you are right now.

“Here comes the rain again,
Falling from the stars,
Drenched in my pain again,
Becoming who we are

As my memory rests,
But never forgets what I lost,
Wake me up when September ends”
Green Day, Wake Me Up When September Ends

Over the years I’ve spent with K, first as friends, then as partners, now as husband and wife, she has endeavoured with varying degrees of success to educate me musically.

My musical education was incredibly poor, largely thanks to my older brother’s terrible attraction to boybands no one has heard of and my dad’s predilection for folk and country.

One of the bands K introduced me to quite early on was Green Day.

The song quoted above became something of an anthem for the two of us, but not for the reason you might think. In fact, it was because I so vehemently disagreed with the sentiment of the song, despite how much I love it.

Everything shapes us

As the lyrics say, we become who we are through the experiences we endure: no matter the joy, the pain or the suffering, it makes us the person we are. It may not be a nice thing to acknowledge, but it’s true.

One night when I was really struggling, K turned around and quoted the song at me, saying she just wished we could both wake up when September ended. But I disagreed.

The metaphorical September we were living through was horrendous, for sure – the tiredness, the illness, the constant bouts of IV antibiotics and hospitalisations, the hope and lost hope of the transplant that may or may not be right around the corner. I also knew, though, that September might be all we had left together and I didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

All too often we are too keen to escape bad experiences – and with good reason – but actually, it’s these Septembers of our lives that make us who we are, that shape the world we live in and that give us the strength we need to carry on, get tougher and to know that whatever life throws at us we can endure, no matter what.

And for people on the transplant list, there is no guarantee that there will be anything to wake up from if you choose to skip September.

*****

Smile Through It: A Year on the Transplant List went on sale on Amazon Kindle yesterday. Chronically the final year before my life-saving double-lung transplant it’s just 99p and, in my humble opinion, quite a good read. Buy it here. Tell your friends. And sign the Organ Donor Register.

Photo: Sister72 on Flickr

Five years ago this morning I was on my way out of surgery and into 4 weeks of the hardest struggle I’ve ever known. A struggle so deep, so intense, at times dispiriting and verging on depressing that I never thought I would come through it.

But when someone else has died and you’ve been granted the gift of a second stab at life, you don’t give up. You don’t quit, you don’t say you’ve had enough. You fight. Hard. With everything you have.

Five years later, I still cannot adequately express the gratitude I feel. There are no words, no images, not even the right song to share the immensity of the feeling.

Instead, I’ve chosen to release a book, something to highlight just how hard everything that came before was. And, in doing so, it made me realise that the 4 weeks of struggle I went through immediately after my transplant were nothing compared to the 12 months that preceded it.

Smile Through It: A Year on the Transplant List – consisting mainly of my own blog posts over the year leading up to the big day and highlighting just how hard it is to live in the constant shadow of death – hits Amazon Kindle bookshelves today, soon to be followed by ePub and hard copy versions.

About the book

The journey I took over the 2.5 years I waited and the year documented on this site and in the book was not a pleasant or fun road to experience, nor one I would wish on the worst of my enemies. That’s not to say you can’t still have fun (as I hope the book shows), but it’s not the kind of thing I’d recommend.

The text has been left almost entirely as-is from the blog posts themselves, save for fixing a few glaring spelling errors. I could have edited more heavily, re-written sections to seem more prescient or circumspect, or removed several of the more mundane episodes, but I chose not to because what I think readers will gain, over the course of the 12 months-worth of posts, is an insight into the true roller coaster lifestyle that anyone awaiting a transplant must endure.

The book covers some of the most exciting times in my life – raising over £20,000 production managing a comedy gig for Live Life Then Give Life, being invited on to Radio 4 and speaking to national newspapers about organ donation and transplant.

But it also covers the terrible toll all of these took on my body and my brain. You’ll see how periods of activity are followed all-too-closely by enforced inactivity and the frustrations and anger that comes with them.

I hope more than anything that this book – like this blog – will serve to give people an illustration of just why it’s so important to sign up to the Organ Donor Register.

You’ll also see just what a dim-witted, self-indulgent, melodramatic, pretentious muppet I can be.

Hopefully, you’ll end up smiling through it with me.

How you can help (if so inclined)

There are 5 things you can do to help me spread the word about today’s release, if you’d like to:

1. Sign the Organ Donor Register (or your country’s equivalent) – the reason I’m releasing the book and writing this blog is to raise awareness of organ donation, so sign yourself up if you don’t do anything else. (Links to registering in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand. If you have others, please let me know so I can add them)
2. Talk to someone else about organ donation – it’s only through conversation that we learn of each other’s wishes and help save lives through awareness and openness.
3. Talk about the book to others and share the link – costs you nothing, but may bring a little light into someone else’s life (I hope).
4. Buy the book – obvious, I know, but significant (and it’s less than a pound!).
5. Once you’ve read it, and if you liked it, leave a review on Amazon to help guide other readers. It take around 5-10 minutes and can really help in spreading the word into the wider Amazon readership.

About my ego

Releasing a book of any kind is something of an exercise in ego, even more so when it’s self-published.

I can’t deny that I hope people will take notice of this book, that I want people to talk about it, share it, encourage other people to buy it. I can’t deny that I want people to read what I’ve written and that releasing some of the posts from this blog into the world in this way is a great way to achieve that.

I also completely understand those who feel that it’s my ego getting the better of me and putting something out there that people can read the vast majority of – completely free – right here on the blog.

But it’s also about reaching an audience who don’t read blogs, who haven’t visited here and who possibly never would. It’s about spreading the message of organ donation as far and wide as we possibly can.

I’ve lost far, far too many friends who’ve succumbed while waiting for a transplant when it doesn’t have to be like that. Arguments about Opt-Out systems and changes in the NHS aside, if everyone in the UK who support the idea of organ donation signed up to the Organ Donor Register, we wouldn’t face 3 needless deaths every single day.

For my donor

I was saved by someone I’ve never met nor will ever have the chance to thank. I’ve been given a second chance to live a life of happiness, fulfilment and joy when one family have had their happiness untimely stolen from them.

If I were to sit and do nothing to show how enormous this unknown benefactor has afforded me, I truly believe I wouldn’t be able to stand proud and say I’d made good use of the time they granted me.

I would love for you to buy, read, enjoy and share my book. But if you don’t want to do that, let’s at least be talking to our loved ones about our own opinions, views and wishes relating to organ donation.

We can all be the hero of someone else’s life; don’t let that chance got to waste.